Editing a file you don’t have permissions for
Regardless of which editor you use, sometimes you’ll want to edit a file that your user doesn’t have write permissions for. For example, if you’re a regular user and you want to edit /etc/hosts – a file owned by root, and writable only by root – you’ll need to either become root or use the sudo command. See Chapter 7, Users and Groups, for more details.
While a command like sudo $EDITOR /etc/hosts can be used to edit files as root, a better approach is to use sudoedit to execute your editing command as root:
sudoedit /etc/hostsEDITOR=nano sudoedit /etc/hostsEDITOR=vi sudoedit /etc/hosts
The first example will use whatever editor you’ve got set in your EDITOR environment variable, while the other two commands pass in (or override) the EDITOR environment variable as part of the command.
